Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
Writer Anne Lamott shared advice about writing and life in the first of this year’s Tuesday Speaker Series, October 2. Though writing has played an integral role in her life, she extended her advice to humanity, and focused on ways to live a more fulfilling life.
“Everything great that happens to writers happened to me, but that isn’t what made me happy-it was the writing itself,” Lamott said. She has been a self-employed writer for 30 years and has written 11 books, four of which were bestsellers. She has also taught numerous writing classes across the country.
Despite her success, Lamott remains down-to-earth. “Her speeches are personal and unassuming, which makes it easy to imagine her as a personal friend,” Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Diana Akiyama said. Akiyama contacted Lamott and organized the writer’s visit.
Lamott stressed the importance of learning to say no. “You need to slow down long enough to get those moments of enlightenment,” she said. She explained that her father, who was also a writer, taught her to pay attention-advice that she also found in writer Fredrick Buechner’s works on writing and faith.
One of the reasons she was chosen to speak for the Tuesday Speaker Series is that she talks about the combination of faith and the arts, Akiyama said. “Everything I know about faith applies to writing,” Lamott said.
Lamott also explained the necessity of ‘the real.’ “People are so desperate for a little real here and there. If you had a year to live, you would stop faking it and do only the stuff that really sang to you,” she said.
She shared many anecdotes about the ups and downs in her writing career. She advised people to “always carry a pen,” and then told a story about how she wrote ideas all over her hands so often that she had to “transcribe her hands” at the end of the day.
Her specific advice to writers was: “Very short assignments and awful, unreadable first drafts.”
In one of her earlier works, Bird by Bird, she explains one of the lessons she learned from her father that she still finds useful. Her brother had procrastinated on a report about birds and “he was immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird,'” she said.
This year’s first-years read Bird by Bird for required summer reading and many came to hear Lamott’s words of wisdom and insight.
Lamott said she still feels unsure of herself, even while writing her 12th book. “I am 60 pages in, and I am still getting to know the characters,” she said.
After touting the importance of “practicing radical silliness” and “laughter as carbonated holiness,” she paused, picked up her papers on the podium and started to ruffle them next to the microphone. “The sound of pencil on paper. That is sacred,” she said.
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